ambitious men love better than freedom, placidity, and
intellectual repose. He lived not in a palace, as he might have lived,
surrounded with flatterers, luxuries, and dignities, but in a cell,
wearing his simple black gown, and walking barefooted wherever he went,
begging his daily bread according to the rules of his Order. His black
gown was not an academic badge, but the Dominican dress. His only badge
of distinction was the doctors' cap.

Dr. Vaughan, in his heavy and unartistic life of Thomas Aquinas, has
drawn a striking resemblance between Plato and the Mediaeval doctor:
"Both," he says, "were nobly born, both were grave from youth, both
loved truth with an intensity of devotion. If Plato was instructed by
Socrates, Aquinas was taught by Albertus Magnus; if Plato travelled into
Italy, Greece, and Egypt, Aquinas went to Cologne, Naples, Bologna, and
Rome; if Plato was famous for his erudition, Aquinas was no less noted
for his universal knowledge. Both were naturally meek and gentle; both
led lives of retirement and contemplation; both loved solitude; both
were celebrated for self-control; both were brave; both held their
pupils spell-bound by their brilliant mental gifts; both passed their
time in lecturing to the schools (what the Pythagoreans were to Plato,
the Benedictines were to the angelical); both shrank from the display of
self; both were great dialecticians; both reposed on eternal ideas; both
were oracles to their generation." But if Aquinas had the soul of Plato,
he also had the scholastic gifts of Aristotle, to whom the Church is
indebted for method and nomenclature as it was to Plato for synthesis
and that exalted Realism which went hand in hand with Christianity. How
far he was indebted to Plato it is difficult to say. He certainly had
not studied his dialectics through translations or in the original, but
had probably imbibed the spirit of this great philosopher through Saint
Augustine and other orthodox Fathers who were his admirers.

Although both Plato and Aristotle accepted "universals" as the
foundation of scientific inquiry, the former arrived at them by
consciousness, and the other by reasoning. The spirit of the two great
masters of thought was as essentially different as their habits and
lives. Plato believed that God governed the world; Aristotle believed
that it was governed by chance. The former maintained that mind is
divine and eternal; the latter that it is a form of the body, and